Mr. Potato Head Gets a Wonky Makeover for a Good Cause
Digging for potatoes can lead to some of the more surprising moments in harvesting a backyard garden. Rooting around the earth beneath the sprawling greenery aboveground, you never quite know what you’re going to pull up. Even if it’s, say, a fingerling potato plant, that doesn’t guarantee that every spud is going to be perfectly thumb-like. Some are knotty; some are kinked like a finger with a joint out of place; others have grown so long that they don’t look like fingerling potatoes at all. But even if it takes a bit of calculated cutting to chop them into evenly sized pieces before cooking them, each of those backyard potatoes—the perfect and the aesthetically challenged ones alike—will have the sweet, earthen taste that makes the act of growing them and pulling them out of the ground worthwhile.
Even if you’re growing Kennebec or russet potatoes—the good old-fashioned kind perfect for french fries or a classic baked potato—they aren’t all going to look like the Mr. Potato Head toy you had as a kid.
There’s something about the level of awareness of every step of raising food for yourself that makes the idea of wasting any of it seem, well, like a waste. I am loath to even peel potatoes I grew myself. But at the grocery store, where there are mounds of similarly sized and shaped spuds that cost maybe a dollar a pound, it doesn’t seem nearly as urgent that every little bit get put to good use. They’re just potatoes, after all. While rolling by with a grocery cart, we don’t see all the misshapen potatoes that are scrapped before the most pleasing ones are put on display.
But as we’ve become increasingly aware, all the bits of wasted food are, in aggregate, a very large amount of wasted food—133 billion pounds annually in the United States alone. With much of that food ending up in landfills, we aren’t just wasting our own dinners—we’re wasting water and other resources used in farming, wasting food that might otherwise help to feed the hungry, and wasting carbon emissions that contribute to climate change to grow something that’s never consumed.
One way to help limit the problem is to re-habituate consumers to accept the lumpy, misshapen fruits and vegetables of the world—to make it acceptable for those piles of grocery store potatoes to be as varied in shape and size as what you might pull out of a backyard garden plot. That’s why toy maker Hasbro has updated its classic—and platonically potato-shaped—Mr. Potato Head with a more knobbly body. The limited-edition Wonky Mr. Potato Head, which is being auctioned off on eBay, will help raise money for the food-waste charity FairShare, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to the U.K.-based nonprofit.
Bidding is open until Sunday night, but if you miss out on a Wonky Mr. Potato Head, you can probably find some other misshapen (and delicious) spuds at your local farmers market—or, perhaps, in your own backyard.